


to pull down the stars

by rosemaryandtime



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Pre-Series, all of them - Freeform, honestly mush, the holts are all nerds, them family feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-27 16:13:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20763224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosemaryandtime/pseuds/rosemaryandtime
Summary: It's not like she hasn't known since Matt was five years old that one day he’d set that beautiful, terrifying focus on getting himself out into extraorbital space.She just didn’t think it would be so soon.Written for theMom's Eyes Only!!!zine.





	to pull down the stars

Colleen’s feet are on the ground, the day of the launch.

It’s hot, the kind of heat that has a weight and heft to it, the kind of heat that shivers along the horizon and bends the stark lines of the earth. The ground is shivering too, a deep subsonic rumble that she can’t with any confidence distinguish from the trembling in her own knees.

(She has the strangest feeling, standing there, that the pressure between the soles of her feet and the ground is not the mass of her body pressing down but the world pressing  _ up, _ a weight she can’t shake.)

♢ ♢ ♢

“There’s an opportunity,” Sam says, and after nineteen years of marriage and a dozen missions, Colleen knows what the look on his face means.

She takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says. She’s not surprised, not really; he’s only taken eight missions in the almost sixteen years since her first pregnancy, and only one was extraorbital. “Okay. How long?”

“Eleven months,” he says, and the words hit her like a blow to the chest, but she swallows and nods and focuses on the screen in front of her.

“When?” she asks, and her voice is steady.

“Not for almost five years,” he says, and she can breathe again. Five years is a long time to get used to an idea; five years is a long time for plans to change.

“Okay,” Colleen says again. “Tell me.”

He launches into his spiel--and it's not the official, polished report; it's a messy stream of words, enthusiasms toppling out one over another. There's an interest in timing a mission to Pluto's moons with the dwarf planet’s upcoming opposition with Earth; the Garrison wants in particular a xenobiologist and the mission is his if he wants it. He hasn't said yes yet--

“But you will,” says Colleen. It comes out a little more resigned than she means it to.

He sits down next to her on the bed, reaching for her hand. She lets him have it, laces their fingers together. 

“I won't,” he says. “Not if you ask me to stay.”

“Sure,” she says, and lets out a short breath like laughter. “And break your heart.” She looks down at their joined hands--aging hands, she thinks; they’re not old, not yet, but their hands are beginning to show the years. “I’m not gonna ask you for that, Sam.”

There is quiet for a moment as they both contemplate the coming separation. Finally, Colleen stirs.

“So,” she says. “You have more to say.”

He grins at her, soft and fond, and she sets aside her laptop to curl up next to him while he talks about the ship being designed for the flight, about the young pilot he intends to approach: “Just graduated a year ago, already a first lieutenant, he's breaking all kinds of records, Colleen, you should  _ see _ his flight logs.”

“Mm,” she says. “As long as you're not entrusting your life and your mission to some hot-shot.”

“He's not,” Sam assures her. “I've been talking to his OIC, he's-- he's a good kid.”

“But a kid,” she counters. There's no real fight here; Sam has an eye for talent and always has. Still, a mission to the edge of the system: Colleen's entitled to a few murmurs, she feels. “Who's your engineer?”

Sam goes quiet for long enough that she twists to look up at him. “Haven't picked anyone yet?” she asks.

“Nooo,” he says slowly. “Not officially.”

There's a strange sort of caginess in his tone; he's not quite looking her in the eye. 

“But you've got your eye on somebody,” she prompts.

He looks at her, licks his lips in what she thinks is nervousness, and says, “Yeah, I do.”

Colleen waits, and then says, mildly irritated,  _ “Sam.” _

“It's Matt,” he says. “I want to take Matt.”

It's ugly between them, for a little while. They fight, and they almost never fight; they shout, and in twenty years they've never shouted.

“He is  _ fifteen years old,”  _ Colleen rages. “You can't take a teenager to space, Sam!”

“I'm not taking a fifteen-year-old to space, I'm taking a nineteen-year-old,  _ maybe,  _ if he qualifies, if he even wants it!”

Colleen scoffs, an angry noise like the sound Tachyon makes when somebody steps on his tail. These are unfair conditions: Matt will certainly qualify; Matt will certainly want it. “Nineteen is too young.”

“I launched twice when I was eighteen,” argues Sam.

“To the _ space station,  _ Sam! Not to fucking  _ Pluto!” _

“Well, we're not  _ going _ to Pluto, we're going to its moons!”

There's a pause, then, while Sam reevaluates his argument. He has the grace to look sheepish, and while Colleen can’t quite forgive him yet, her anger ebbs a little when he closes his eyes and lowers his head and says, “I’m sorry, I… didn’t want to fight.”

She’s not going to apologize, not right now. She crosses her arms over her chest and she clenches her jaw, because she’s always been an angry crier and  _ not now damn it, _ and she says, “I need some time.”

“Sure,” Sam says immediately, and she won’t look at him, because she knows his face has gone all guilty and contrite. “I’m gonna… run some errands. I’ll pick Katie up on the way home.”

Colleen nods jerkily, eyes stubbornly on the wall. Sam hesitates, then makes his way out past her. She doesn’t watch him go.

She stays where she is until she hears the sound of the car backing down the driveway, then she folds forward and leans her elbows on her desk, covering her face. Now that she has the privacy to scream and sob and hit things, everything she wanted to do a moment ago--now she only feels tired and empty. 

It’s not even a surprise. It’s not like she hasn’t known since Matt was five years old that he wanted to go to space like his daddy. It’s not like she didn’t look this very day in the face, twenty years ago, and decide it was worth it. She just didn’t think she’d have to face it so soon, and she’s  _ furious _ with Sam for making her.

She finds herself standing in the doorway of Matt’s room. It’s quiet, empty, unnaturally clean; he comes home from the Garrison on weekends and breaks, but the carpet still shows the pristine parallel tracks of the vacuum robot from when it last ran three days ago. 

There’s a poster on the wall, a vintage-style print:  _ NASA _ in big bold letters, white against a blue field of stars. There’s a model space-shuttle on Matt’s dresser, an Apollo model, she’s forgotten which one. Matt and Sam had put it together when he was seven, when Colleen was hugely pregnant with Katie, a week of quiet, intensely focused evenings with newspaper and tiny parts spread out all over the dining room table. There’s his telescopes, both the functional one and the old broken one he rescued from a sale at the university and has slowly been rebuilding.

Five years, she thinks. Five years is a long time.

♢ ♢ ♢

“Family council,” Sam says the Friday night after next, and herds them all out to the living room. There’s already a fire in the fireplace, as is traditional for these meetings, and Katie claims her place on the hearth, knobby knees updrawn. Matt flops on his belly on the rug, to Bae Bae’s great delight. 

Colleen curls her legs underneath her in the corner of the couch, pulling Tachyon to sit with her. He lets out a creaky cranky meow at the shift, but settles on her lap with bad grace, light and bony with age under his thick black fur. She pets and soothes him while Sam breaks the news of the Kerberos mission to Matt and Katie. 

Matt has shifted to sit up by the time Sam concludes, his arms looped loosely around his knees and his eyes bright. “Do you have a crew yet?” he asks, too casual. 

“Well,” says Sam. “I haven’t formally accepted the mission yet. That’s what this family council is about. It’s been nineteen years since I took a mission even close to this duration, and I’ve only taken one long mission since you two were born.” He pauses, his eyes shifting between the three of them. “This family comes first, so this is a family decision.”

There’s a contemplative pause, a heavy silence broken only by the crackle of the fire and Tachyon’s reluctant purring.

“That’s really far away,” says Katie finally. 

“Yeah,” Sam agrees.

“You’d be the first one there,” says Matt. “The first one ever.”

Sam nods.

“That would be pretty cool.” Katie's hugging herself where she sits, but her eyes are glinting with the same fire as Matt's. “I wish I could go too.”

“Who's your engineer going to be?” Matt asks persistently, and Sam meets Colleen's eyes across the room.

Matt is not to be pushed into the position, that's Colleen's condition. He's not to be steered toward it, he's not to be influenced to reach beyond his own ambition. He is a child, and deserves to remain a child: he has time.

“I don't know,” answers Sam. “The crew won't be settled for another year, at least, maybe two. If I take the mission.”

“It's not for five years, right?” asks Matt. “So it could be somebody who's still a cadet now, right?”

Sam pauses. “It could be,” he allows, and says nothing more. 

Matt is not subtle with his intentions. He hugs his knees, his eyes shining. Katie observes him, and her eyes slip past to meet Colleen's. For a moment they understand each other very well.

Still, when they put it to a vote, carefully anonymous on their tablets, it's unanimous: Sam will accept command of the Kerberos mission.

♢ ♢ ♢ 

One summer evening, when Katie is four and Matt is eleven, Katie comes running into the kitchen to announce importantly that Matt has something to show them in the backyard. Colleen and Sam exchange glances and follow her back outside.

Matt has gathered together every fan they own and arranged them in a rough circle on the other side of the backyard, each pointing so that its airstream intersects the next. There’s a tin bucket in the middle full of some dark liquid, and Matt has just lit a match.

Colleen swears and scoops up Katie. Sam dives for the extension cord. Matt tosses the match.

The fireball from the igniting lighter fluid leaps up into the clear dark sky, already being shaped by the coordinating airstreams into a graceful twisting tube, glowering orange and dark and deadly. It’s almost working; Colleen can see the thought and care Matt put into positioning the fans--but something’s not right, the calculations were off somewhere, and the fire is listing too far to the side, curving low over the ground, gluts of flame licking out, swinging  _ dangerously close to their son. _

Matt is frozen, helpless and huge-eyed, cowering back as the fire strikes out at him like a coiled snake. Sam pulls the cord out of the socket with a desperate jerk--and the twisting column abruptly disintegrates as the fans power off, leaving wisps of flame ten feet high to rise and flicker out, leaving a roaring-but-manageable blaze in the tin bucket.

Across the yard, Matt falls. 

_ “No,” _ Colleen snarls, and puts Katie down to sprint. Sam’s there with her, lifting Matt by the shoulders--and he’s all right, he’s not hurt badly, he’s a little scorched and he smells of singed hair and acrid smoke, but he’s okay, he’s okay. He’s crying and clinging to Sam, and she scoots closer and pulls him into her lap; he’s getting too big for this, but she desperately needs to touch, to hold, to verify that he’s  _ safe. _

“It wasn’t supposed to-- it wasn’t supposed to--” Matt blubbers, and Colleen turns him to face her, checking the hot redness on the side of his face. There’s no blistering, but he flinches when her fingers brush the edges of the burned skin.

“Baby,” she says, and by some miracle her voice is steady. “Come on, let’s get some aloe on that.”

“It wasn’t supposed to  _ do that,” _ Matt wails. “It was supposed to-- it was--” His hands describe a pillar, straight vertical up-and-down. 

“Okay,” says Colleen, pulling him up to his feet. “We’ll figure out what went wrong later, after we get you cleaned up.”

“And  _ after,” _ Sam says, rather forbiddingly, “we have a talk about doing experiments unsupervised.”

Matt sniffles and nods, too shaken to argue. 

Katie is hanging back, wide-eyed and uncertain, so Colleen gathers her in as they pass on the way back to the house. Sam stays behind to put out the fire. 

Matt shows her his computer simulation the next day, his face still red and beginning to peel. It’s remarkably sophisticated; he’s definitely done his homework, and Colleen glows a little bit with secret pride. She plays with it for a moment, runs it backward and forward, looks at the values associated with each little gray block standing in for a fan. “Where did you get these stats?” she asks curiously.

“I went on the website for each fan,” says Matt, hugging his knees on the chair next to her. “They’ve all got the RPMs and blade area listed.”

“Good researching,” she says, lifting her eyebrows, and the unburned side of Matt’s face flushes pleased red to match the other. “I bet that’s where it broke down for you in practice, though.”

“What, why?” asks Matt, unfolding his legs to sit forward, looking at the screen.

“Because,” says Colleen, gesturing at the specs window where she’s still got it up for one of the fans, “these are factory defaults. This is the RPM fresh out of the box, but some of those fans are ten years old. That wobbly one with the stutter is one I had in college.”

It takes a second, but his eyes light up. “So if I-- so if I figure out some way to find the real RPM and adjust my set-up--”

“And?” prompts Colleen, giving him a warning look. 

“And get you and Dad to help,” Matt says guiltily, avoiding her eyes.

“Good…”

“...then if I adjust everything to make up for the ones that are kinda worn out, then it... should work?”

She lifts her shoulders, trying to keep her grin under control. “If it doesn’t, then we go back to the drawing board and isolate other variables until it does.”

He nods. He’s wearing the same jeans from last night, and he rubs at a spot of mud or soot on the knee. “I’m sorry, for…”

Colleen reaches out, chucks him under the chin on the unburned side of his face. “It’s how we learn,” she says gently, and he peeks up at her and smiles.

♢ ♢ ♢

“Mom,” Matt says, four months after the family council, and she knows.

They’re in the sunroom that doubles as her home office and sometimes-laboratory, and Matt’s been dancing nervously around the subject for an hour. It’s not like him to hover and prevaricate, and Colleen’s been letting him dangle. It’s a bit merciless, but if he’s going to do it he needs to be able to say it first.

“Mm?” she answers, not taking her attention off the naked, rotting roots of the half-dead  _ Tolumnia _ in her hands. It’ll pull through, she’s reasonably confident, maybe even flower in a year or two, but it’ll take time and love and a couple months of very close attention.

“I--” says Matt, and falters. “Mom, can you-- I’m, I really want to talk to you about something, if…”

Here it comes, she thinks, and shuts her eyes for a moment. “Sure, baby,” she says, and gently sets the orchid in its empty pot before she turns around. 

Matt’s sitting cross-legged on the floor under the seven-foot-tall orange tree she’d started from a seed in the windowsill of their first apartment. He’s got his lower lip between his teeth, watching her with large-eyed apprehension as she wipes her hands. When she’s sitting across from him, one leg tucked under her on the wicker bench, he doesn’t seem to know how to start.

“What’s up?” she finally prompts, taking pity on him.

“I…” he says again, and his eyes dart away from her for a moment. She watches as he takes a deep breath and settles himself, finds his resolve. “I want to put in my name for consideration for Dad’s mission. To Kerberos.”

It hits just as hard as she thought it would, a dull impact somewhere between her lungs. But she’s had months to prepare for this, and she pushes the prickling behind her eyes away for later.

“Okay,” she says, and takes a deep breath. “You’ve thought about what that means.”

“Yes,” says Matt, and she can see that he has. The starry-eyed enthusiasm of four months ago is muted; in its place there’s something heavier, more serious, a determination and stillness that makes a lump rise in her throat. For a moment she can see the young man he’ll be, capable and confident and  _ ready. _

But then his eyes flick up to seek hers, and it’s her child looking at her now: searching, a little wary, looking for her reaction, validation, confirmation that he  _ can... _

Colleen looks back at him, and thinks of a little boy who flew rockets around the back yard, who sent fire shooting up past the powerlines, who spent hours and hours tinkering with a broken telescope so he could see the stars.

“Alright,” she says softly. “Let’s chart this out.”

♢ ♢ ♢

For the next fifteen months, Matt is single-minded in his pursuit of a place on the Kerberos mission. He studies, he spends every available minute with Sam in the lab, he runs simulations on his laptop at home until late into the night. Despite Sam’s preference for Matt as a mission partner, there are a dozen other highly qualified candidates for the position, and the competition is fierce. Colleen keeps close watch: there’s a line between passion and obsession that blurs with proximity, and she won’t have her son burning himself out at sixteen. 

It’s not until the drive home from Matt’s final aptitude test that it all comes to a head.

“Mom--” he blurts, and Colleen pulls in a breath and veers off the freeway to park, because he’s sitting bowed forward over his knees with a hand clapped over his mouth. He’s got the door open before the car’s motion has even stopped, leaning out as far as the seatbelt will let him. 

“Okay,” she says, and unbuckles to scoot nearer to him, rubbing his back as he empties his stomach onto the side of the road. “Okay, baby, it’s okay, it’s okay--”

When it’s over, when she’s dug a bottle of water out of the cooler in the back seat and he’s sitting wrung-out and pale in the passenger seat, he wipes his mouth and whispers, “I’m not gonna get the mission.”

“Sweetie,” Colleen begins, frowning; Sam would have told her if a decision had been made already--

“I messed up,” Matt says, and shuts his eyes tightly. “The landing simulation, it wasn’t--it was  _ barely _ within parameters, I messed up really bad, I’m not gonna get in, I’m not--”

And then he’s folding forward again, his hands lacing over the nape of his neck, and he’s shaking with silent, devastated sobs.

“Hey,” breathes Colleen, and gathers him in. She hushes him, holds him tightly while he trembles. She talks him down, she reminds him of his tenacity and compassion and his place in her heart, she reminds him how to breathe. “We’re gonna go home,” she says, brushing his hair out of his face. “We’re gonna go home and we’re gonna put this away for the next couple weeks, okay?”

“Okay,” he agrees, head down, jaw set. He’s embarrassed, she can tell; he’s ashamed to have needed this.

“Okay,” she says, and lets her hand fall away. “I’m so proud of you, Matt. I’m so proud of how hard you worked. No matter what we hear next week, that doesn’t change. Got it?”

“Got it,” he whispers.

♢ ♢ ♢ 

The call finally comes in the middle of the afternoon, two weeks later.

_ “Doctor Holt,” _ says the woman on the other end of the line.  _ “This is Admiral Sanda of the Galaxy Garrison. I’m calling to speak to Cadet Matthew Holt.” _

Colleen’s heart jumps, and stops, and begins again, a slow heavy pounding. Matt’s hovering in the doorway, and she turns to look at him.

“He’s here,” she hears herself say, and Matt’s eyes widen. “Let me-- one moment, please.”

She lowers the tablet from her ear, holds it out to her son. Matt shuffles forward to take it, white-lipped; he nearly fumbles it in the transfer. There’s a moment where he can’t seem to move, where he only holds the tablet and stares down at it.

“Hey,” whispers Colleen, and reaches out to grip his upper arm. 

He startles a little, swallows, and looks up at her helplessly. 

“Love you,” she tells him, soft enough that the tablet’s microphone won’t pick it up. “So much. No matter what.”

He stares back at her for a beat--and then he blinks, and his eyes focus, and he draws a shaky breath. “Love you too,” he whispers.

And he raises the tablet to answer.

♢ ♢ ♢

Colleen’s feet are on the ground, the day of the launch.

The ground trembles with the shock of ignition and liftoff; tucked beneath her arm Katie is trembling too, her eyes bright with excitement and envy. They stand together in the blistering July heat, shading their eyes against the searing white glare of the desert sun, until even the fading roar is lost to the stirring of the wind between the mesas. 

If she closes her eyes, Colleen can still feel the last hug she gave Matt, the last kiss with Sam on her lips.

They stay longer, until the curving white plume of the  _ Hekate’s _ ascent begins to blur at the edges, until the news crews begin to pack up and the viewing pavilion begins to empty, cars and hoverbikes pulling out of the lot beyond.

Eleven months, thinks Colleen, and mentally ticks off the first day, sets her shoulders against the weight of the rest.

“Come on,” she murmurs to Katie, and presses her lips to the top of her daughter’s head. “Let’s go home.”


End file.
